Privacy Policy

Welcome to The Edinburgh Tutor Company’s privacy policy. This aims to give you information on how we collect, process and protect your personal data through your use of our website and any subsequent communication with us. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gives you more control over how your personal information is used.

Personal data is any information about an individual from which that individual can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been anonymised or removed.

How do we collect your personal data?

We gather this information from the direct interactions we have with you. This may be when you give us your personal data by filling in the enquiry form on our website, or when you contact us by phone or email. The information we collect is summarised below:

Personal Information that we collect through our services

Contact data – includes your full name, postal address and postcode, telephone contact details and email address.
Messaging data – includes any information provided by your use of the website’s messaging system.
Student profile data – includes the school you attend, thesubject(s) and level that you require tuition and any
other information you choose to give us that helps us find the right tutor for you.

Tutor profile data – includes the subject(s) and level you wish to tutor, your CV, travel preferences, driving licence details (if applicable), information received from references you provide, feedback from students who have used your services as a tutor, and information (optional) you provide in your biography. As part of our background and vetting checks on you, we will also retain a copy of evidence of entitlement to work in the UK, your Disclosure Scotland check and of any degree and other educational attainments. We also require your bank details to enable us to pay you for your tutoring work.

Aggregate data – this may be derived from your personal data but the data does not directly or indirectly reveal your identity.

We use your information to:

Contact you about any changes to the terms and conditions relating to the services we offer
Make arrangements to provide a tuition service at your home or other mutually agreed suitable place.
To form a contract with you
Share relevant details with your tutor(s)
To invoice you for the provision of a tutoring service
To contact you for any other matters relevant to the provision of either current or future tutoring service
To enable us to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation
Internal record keeping
Carry out appropriate background checks on tutors as part of our child protection policy

Your rights

You have the right to request what personal information is held about you and our reasons for processing it. Below please find examples of rights that all individuals have under the GDPR data protection laws. Please be advised that they do not apply in all circumstances, for example, where we are legally obliged to retain data or it is necessary in order for us to maintain our service to you. You can access any of these rights by contacting us. The following is a summary of those rights;

Right of access – you have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you. Please contact us if you would like to know more about what data we hold about you.
Right of rectification – you have a right to ask us to correct data that we hold about you that is inaccurate or incomplete.
Right to be forgotten – you can ask for the data we hold about you to be erased from our records where there is no longer a good reason for us to continue to process it.
Right to restriction of processing – where certain conditions apply to have a right to restrict the processing.
Right to object – you have the right to object to certain types of processing such as direct marketing.
Right of portability – you have the right to have the data we hold about you transferred to another organisation.

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data or to exercise any of the other rights. However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances. We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally, it may take us longer than one month in which case, we will notify you and keep you updated.

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), (www.ico.org.uk). Of course, we would appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO, so please contact us in the first instance.

Data security

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way. We also limit access to your personal data to tutors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They are all subject to a duty of confidentiality. We have procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and the ICO of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

Data retention

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil our contractual obligations to you and to comply with any legal and regulatory requirements.

Payment Processors

We use a third party, GoCardless to process payments for our service, whose use of your personal information is governed by their privacy policy. We do not store any customer banking details except where the customer has volunteered this information for a specific purpose.

Use of Cookies & log files

We use cookies to enable us to gather information about your use of our site and details of your visits such as pages viewed. Every time someone visits our web site a log file is generated on our server. The log file records the time and date of your visit, the files that were requested, your IP (Internet Protocol) address, the referrer URL (if provided) and the browser version. We collect this information to help us diagnose problems and administer our systems and to audit the geographical make-up of users and how they have arrived at our site; that is, from what other sites have visitors arrived – this information being obtained from the referrer URL.

We do not normally link IP addresses to anything personally identifiable, which means that you remain anonymous even though we include your IP address in our aggregate information.

Lawful basis for processing your personal data

It is necessary for the performance of a contract to which you are a party, or to take steps prior to entering into a contract with you, for us to provide you with our service. Where we require information from you for these purposes we have set out above which information it is necessary for us to process, without which we will be unable to provide you with our services.
It is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests, such as fraud prevention, child protection, maintaining quality of service, maintaining our internal records and to enable us to run our business.
It is necessary to comply with a legal obligation

Disclosing Your Information

We will not disclose your personal information to any other party other than in accordance with this Privacy Policy and in the circumstances detailed below:

In the event that we sell any or all of our business to a buyer.
Where we are legally required by law to disclose your personal information.
To further fraud protection and reduce the risk of fraud.

Users Under 18

If you are under 18, please ensure that you obtain your parent/guardian’s consent beforehand whenever you provide Personal Information to the website. Users without such consent are not allowed to provide us with personal information.

Contacting us at The Tutor Company Edinburgh

If you have any concerns about our privacy policy, or have comments or questions regarding it, please contact us and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you have. If we update our policy we will update this page accordingly.